Next time you're strolling around your neighborhood, check if any mailboxes are missing. If they are, call the local media. Seriously—here's the Baltimore Sun with a story on the removal of a single mailbox in Baltimore. baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md…
Keep an eye out if you, like me, live in New York City—some of our mailboxes have been removed. tmz.com/2020/08/14/usp…
Another example of local media coverage of the mailbox scandal, this one from Morristown, NJ, and (like the TMZ article above) sparked by social media reports. dailyrecord.com/story/news/loc…
A story from Massachusetts. universalhub.com/2020/probably-…
The way a one-day story turns into a multi-day story is new news coming out—reporters can't write a second piece on even an important story without a hook. So take a walk around your neighborhood. Look for missing mailboxes. And give your local reporters a hook.
And take a look at these stories—notice how the reporters often use the reports of mailbox removal as a peg to hang a bunch more info on. They bring in national angles, call elected officials, recap previous coverage. That's how good journalists build coverage.
No news site is going to send people out to every corner in your town to look for missing mailboxes—and they don't know where the mailboxes used to be, even if they wanted to. But you know where your mailboxes are, and god knows we could all use the exercise.
Again, the Baltimore Sun ran a 20-paragraph story on the USPS crisis yesterday—a good, solid, robust story—because someone emailed them and told them that one mailbox had been removed from their neighborhood. One. baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md…
You can make this kind of coverage happen near you. Go out, check for missing mailboxes, take a photo of the site if you find any, and post. Post on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, wherever. And tag your local news outlets and journalists. Hell, tag me too, while you're at it.
People love the Post Office, and they care about their local mailboxes. Reporters are itching to write about this story, and your neighbors will be itching to read it. This kind of thing makes a difference. Really.
We've seen in the last 48 hours that Dem congressional leadership is beginning to move more aggressively on this scandal. That's not happening in a vacuum. It's happening because they're being pushed.
And the kind of people who get really upset when someone takes their local mailbox away tend to be the kind of people who vote, too. And they're the kind of people who call their local elected officials to complain.
It's a lovely gray drizzly day in Upper Manhattan, and I haven't been out of the apartment in a while. I'm gonna go take a walk.
*waves at all the journalists liking and RTing tweets from this thread*
REPORT THESE TOO
Oooh, this is good too.
And I think I mentioned this somewhere, but I used this map when I took my walk: mailboxlocate.com
